Video coding schemes include compression methods for reducing the size of encoded video in communications. The compression allows encoded video data to be transferred with improved bit-rate or bandwidth usage. The encoded video is then decompressed and decoded at the destination to retrieve the video's original data. However, the compression of video can introduce distortion in the view, which can degrade video viewing quality. Therefore, metrics for evaluating view distortion are used to determine whether the resulting distortion is acceptable. In the case of three-dimensional (3D) video coding, the metric for evaluating view distortion needs to take into account the depth dimension of the images, that is the distance of the objects in the images from the camera. An efficient metric for properly evaluating view distortion, including depth impact, on 3D video images is needed.